US battery developer Delorean Power and the Holden Municipal Light Department (HMLD), a utility in the US state of Massachusetts, have unveiled a new battery storage project in the town of Holden.
The facility will have an output of 5MW and a storage capacity of 22MWh, and the developers expect to finish construction at the project next year, and commission the facility in October 2024. Delorean received approval for the project from the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC), a public utility that manages the state’s energy grid, and the facility will be the first developed by the company under the oversight of the MMWEC.
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“With this project, HMLD is leading the way in environmental stewardship in a fiscally responsible manner,” said HMLD general manage Barry Tupper. “Delorean Power, MMWEC and HMLD staff have spent countless hours working on this agreement and we at HMLD are looking forward to October 2024 when the battery storage will be operational.”
While the developers did not announce technical specifications of the new project, both are optimistic about its potential to help realise their long-term decarbonisation goals. HMLD plans to add the new storage system to what it calls its “newly rebuilt” Chaffins substation in the town of Holden, and the company’s portfolio of power generation facilities, of which 60% are what it calls “non-carbon emitting”, could stand to benefit from a greater storage capacity to overcome the variance inherent to many forms of renewable power generation.
The news is a positive development for Delorean in particular, which received US$20 million in funding from financier Greenbacker Capital Management last year, and the Massachusetts storage sector more broadly. In 2018, the state government obligated power projects with a capacity of more than 500kW to be paired with energy storage, and legislation such as this has encouraged the sustained growth of the state’s sector, which had the fourth most storage capacity in the US in October 2022.
Energy storage is growing in the state partially thanks to the Clean Peak Standard, which remunerates technologies which can provide power during peak demand periods. Developer Bluewave, mainly known for community solar, is one of those launching large-scale projects in the state, which it discussed with Energy-Storage.news in an interview earlier this year, said the Standard is an important part of the business case for storage in Massachusetts.
